Beautiful music begins with a Squeak & Squawk

squeaksquawk1.jpg

It was 8 p.m. and the hallways of Porter Creek Secondary School had seldom been more clogged.

Anxious faces, nervous chatter, hands gripping shiny new musical instruments just tightly enough so as not to drop them, but not so tightly that they would bend. So, how tight is that?

They filled four hallways leading toward one central gymnasium where volunteers had set up chairs earlier that day. Half of the chairs faced the other half. On one side of the gym would be family and friends and, on the other, first-time musicians and the volunteer musicians who had coached them just minutes earlier.

They had heard about this moment.

Everyone knows about Squeak & Squawk.

It is the night that first-year band students from F.H. Collins and Porter Creek Secondary Schools and Jack Hulland and from Whitehorse Elementary Schools receive their chosen instruments and get to play them as part of a band.

But, first, they need to go to one of 16 classrooms spread throughout the school to learn how to clean and care for them, how to assemble them and, finally, how to make music.

If it is a squeak, that's fine.

If it is a squawk, hey, who cares? This is Squeak & Squawk.

Leading them are members of the All-City Band and the Senior Band. Volunteers, all of them, and most of them remember sitting in that gymnasium surrounded by "instruments of noise" of all shape and manner and unknown names.

But look at them now.

Yes, look at them now. They have spent hundreds of hours practising with their instruments and have performed for audiences in Whitehorse and elsewhere on field trips.

Nice people, all of them, flush with the responsibility of igniting the same passion they feel for their instruments in another ... or, at least, a tolerance for the foibles and challenges these instruments inflict and demand, respectively.

"Teachers don't have time for this," says a veteran of the concert band, Kim Friedenberg. "So we run them through it ... the do's and the don'ts.

"This will give them a two or three-week head start."

Along with Ben Logan, the two of them showed some students the baritone (a small version of a tuba) and how to hold their mouths to play the first three notes they were about to learn.

Austin Stadel was one of those students. He said he originally picked the trumpet, but the mouthpiece just wasn't something he could get comfortable with.

"This is exciting," he says. "The mouth feel is funny, my lips are tingling from blowing.

"It's going to be fun."

Then comes the instruction: "What position is C?" asks Friedenberg. "Good. Now, D? Good job. OK, start with the slide in the first position."

The room fills with noise.

"We are going to try this one more time."

They work at it until they perform a passable rendition of Three Of A Kind, a song that has only three notes.

"That's really good," says Friedenberg. "That's the best one.

"We'll do it three more times and then get you guys to the gym for your first mini-concert."

Down the hall, there are three boys lined up at snare drums and another at a xylophone. They dutifully tap the drums with drumsticks at a slow beat.

They look like caged animals, wanting to let loose on the drum ... no, on a wall of drums in front of an adoring and raucous crowd.